Luc Besson on Valerian Building a Better Spaceship, and More

Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again–forever.”

When Matthew McConaughey’s Detective Rustin Cohle spoke those words in 2014’s True Detective, they had a distinctly pessimistic bent to them. But when you apply them to the lens of pop culture, specifically to the work of director Luc Besson, they take on an entirely new meaning. The Paris-born writer-director is hard at work on his latest film, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a big budget, sprawling sci-fi epic based on Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières’ cult classic graphic novel Valérian and Laureline.